I still have to wonder though how it slipped through the cracks of the "exotics should feel overpowered, but not be overpowered" philosophy.

I still wonder how that's supposed to work, and if they think they did a good job. The Last Word and Invective look pretty normal and they sound like they're made of plastic, but they're extraordinary weapons. If it wasn't for Hawkmoon and Thorn, TLW would the one getting all the hand cannon hate, and indeed for a while there it was. Meanwhile, Universal Remote is noticeably longer than any other shotgun, it has a scope no other weapon has, it has crazy range, and it sounds OK, but the slow rate of fire and reload speed make it really limited in where it's useful.

I'd always assumed that Bungie wanted Gjallarhorn to be as powerful as it is. I believe the impending nerf has more to do with the negative trends taking hold in LFG sites than anything else.

I'm a firm believer that the LFG stuff is overblown. You're going to hear about these on the forums and on reddit because those stories are ridiculous, and are going to get pushed to the top. I've never once been asked if I had a Gjallarhorn.

There is a Gjallarhorn required raid in our fire team builder right now.

I run in to stuff like this often in my line of work... people will know there is something they don't like about the guitar they are playing, but they'll identify the problem incorrectly. I had a customer tell me "I hate the shape of the neck on this one". I examined the guitar he was playing, took it back to my work bench, lowered the strings a bit to make it easier to play, and handed it back. "This one feels great! Is it the same model?"

The difference though, as far as I see it, is that even though my customer identified the problem incorrectly, there was a problem with how the guitar felt in his left hand. If Gjallarhorn's visual effects weren't apparent enough, I can see how one or two people might say "this gun isn't powerful enough"... but I would think someone, somewhere along the way would identify the actual problem and correct things accordingly, just as I did when my customer complained about the shape of the neck he was playing.

Yea, being a good game design is often times the exact same thing. People know that something is wrong, but they almost never know what. There's an anecdote about borderlands where people complained of too many enemies in a zone, making it too slow to travel through, so gearbox tripled the number of enemies and no one ever complained about it again.

And who knows... maybe that is exactly what happened. The visual effects of the wolfpack rounds are plenty visible now, so by the sounds of things they did get visually beefed up at some point. But I have a tough time believing that nobody at bungie was aware of how earth-shatteringly powerful it is, which is why I still think Gally's damage output is intentional.

Yea, the article is abit awkward about that thesis (that's why I put the subject in quotes). I think Gjally was always supposed to be desireable, but I think the response is more about why it became this status symbol in the community.

The difference though, as far as I see it, is that even though my customer identified the problem incorrectly, there was a problem with how the guitar felt in his left hand. If Gjallarhorn's visual effects weren't apparent enough, I can see how one or two people might say "this gun isn't powerful enough"... but I would think someone, somewhere along the way would identify the actual problem and correct things accordingly, just as I did when my customer complained about the shape of the neck he was playing.

And who knows... maybe that is exactly what happened. The visual effects of the wolfpack rounds are plenty visible now, so by the sounds of things they did get visually beefed up at some point. But I have a tough time believing that nobody at bungie was aware of how earth-shatteringly powerful it is, which is why I still think Gally's damage output is intentional.

I think the problem was two fold honestly. I think Bungie purposefully made it as powerful as it is, but it was in response to people feeling it was underpowered (possibly because of the unfinished effects). In addition I think that they didn't see its power as an issue when the game was first released, but mostly because it took a long time for a significant amount of the game's population to have Gjallahorn. Now that they saw the effects of a huge percentage of the active population using Gjallahorn ALL the time they decided to balance it.

Basically all I'm saying is I imagine the truth lies somewhere in the middle. They probably knew to a certain degree just how overpowered it was, but they didn't suspect it to become as big a problem as it is.

I don't believe a word of this. The Suros Regime sounded like it was firing Ping-Pong balls, but was still considered one of the most devastating weapons pre-nerf.

I agree that hard math isn't the end-all of balancing, but "I can overpower a gun just by adjusting the audio" is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.

This is actually a pretty common thing. THere's an anecdote from the development of one of the MP wolfenstien's (enemy territory?) where an investor called out a gun for being way underpowered, and the designer went into their sound editor, beefed the bass, brought it back, and the investor suddenly thought it was OP. It went on to be the most popular weapon in the game.

Similarly, there was a similar dynamic in Halo Reach. In the Beta, the pistol was widely seen as a massive beast, and Bungie responded by slightly reducing it's ROF. When the final game rolled around people treated it like a massive nerf.

Here's the thing though, due to a change they didn't talk about the gun was actually made *better*. Basically, from the Reach Beta to the final they dropped weapon kick in favor of just having Bloom. Essentially they maxed stability. This made the weapon feel worse, even though it was basically stronger.

I run in to stuff like this often in my line of work... people will know there is something they don't like about the guitar they are playing, but they'll identify the problem incorrectly. I had a customer tell me "I hate the shape of the neck on this one". I examined the guitar he was playing, took it back to my work bench, lowered the strings a bit to make it easier to play, and handed it back. "This one feels great! Is it the same model?"

The difference though, as far as I see it, is that even though my customer identified the problem incorrectly, there was a problem with how the guitar felt in his left hand. If Gjallarhorn's visual effects weren't apparent enough, I can see how one or two people might say "this gun isn't powerful enough"... but I would think someone, somewhere along the way would identify the actual problem and correct things accordingly, just as I did when my customer complained about the shape of the neck he was playing.

And who knows... maybe that is exactly what happened. The visual effects of the wolfpack rounds are plenty visible now, so by the sounds of things they did get visually beefed up at some point. But I have a tough time believing that nobody at bungie was aware of how earth-shatteringly powerful it is, which is why I still think Gally's damage output is intentional.

We run into this sort of thing in TV all the time as well. People are really good at pointing out that *something* is off, but not very good at articulating what the actual problem is. It takes years of experience with troubleshooting to really get down to the actual causes.